Information technology landscapes and system architectures do not remain static. Acquisitions and divestitures are normal occurrences. During acquisition, a company has to deal with changes in its enterprise system landscape to include systems (e.g., systems of acquired company) supplied by different vendors of enterprise system. Thereby, the company tends to have a heterogeneous landscape of enterprise systems. On other hand, there are significant benefits in having homogeneous landscape of enterprise systems than having the heterogeneous landscape of enterprise systems for smoother operation of business. Therefore, consolidating systems and decommissioning legacy systems are carried out for simplifying the system landscape, and to reduce license cost and maintenance costs.
However, the process of decommissioning systems impacts existing processes, master data management across applications, metadata management across systems and naming standards that vary between different applications. The existing process of system decommissioning involves high levels of project risk in terms of costs and time as there is no generic way lo adapt data from the legacy system to another system before decommissioning the legacy system. For example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems offering system support to processes like production planning sales and distribution, finance, human resource management and the like handles very critical functionalities for the company and hence implementing ERP (e.g., adapting an off the shelf ERP product to the company needs and processes) is often a challenging and critical activity for the organization.